Berkeley denied that there was such a thing as an object behind our sense impressions; David Hume denied that there was such a thing as a subject behind our perception of change. The first denied matter, the second denied spirit; the first had not wanted us to add to the succession of impressions the metaphysical notion of matter, the second did not want us to add to the succession of mental states the metaphysical notion of an I. So logical is this extension of Berkeley’s arguments, that Berkeley had already foreseen them (as Alexander Campbell Fraser noted) and went so far as to try to challenge it by means of the Cartesian ergo sum. “In consequence of your own principles, it should follow that you are only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them. Words are not to be used without a meaning. And as there is no more meaning in spiritual substance than in material substance, the one is to be exploded as well as the other.” Thus reasons Hylas, anticipating Hume, in the third and last of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Hume corroborates this idea (in Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 6): “We are a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity. . . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. . . . The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.”
Once the idealist argument is admitted, it is my understanding that it is possible—perhaps inevitable—to go further. For Berkeley, time is “the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly and is participated in by all beings” (Principles of Human Knowledge, 98); for Hume, it is “a succession of indivisible moments” (Treatise of Human Nature, I, 2, 3). However, with both matter and spirit—continuities—denied, with space denied, I do not know by what right we are to retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither then must time exist outside each present moment. Let us take a moment of the utmost simplicity: for example, the moment of Chuang Tzu’s dream. (Chuang Tzu, Herbert Allen Giles, 1899.) Some twenty-four centuries ago, Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly, and, when he awoke he was not sure whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt he was a man. Let us not consider the moment of awakening, but the moment of the dream itself, or one of its moments. “I dreamt I was a butterfly fluttering through the air knowing nothing at all of Chuang Tzu,” says the ancient text. We shall never know whether Chuang Tzu saw a garden over which he seemed to flutter or whether he saw a mobile yellow triangle, which was doubtless himself, but it is clear that the image was subjective, even though it was supplied to him by memory. The doctrine of psychophysical parallelism will hold that the image in question must have corresponded to some change in the dreamer’s nervous system; according to Berkeley, at that moment the body of Chuang Tzu did not exist, nor did the black bedroom in which he was dreaming, save as a perception in the mind of God. Hume simplifies what happened even more. According to him, at that moment the spirit of Chuang Tzu did not exist; all that existed were the colors of the dream and the certainty of his being a butterfly. He existed as a momentary term in the “bundle or collection of different perceptions” which constituted, some four centuries before Christ, the mind of Chuang Tzu; he existed as the term n in an infinite temporal series, between n—1 and n + 1. There is no other reality, for idealism, than that of mental processes; to add an objective butterfly to the butterfly one perceives seems, in its eyes, a vain duplication; to add an I to the mental processes seems, in its eyes, as no less exorbitant. Idealism holds that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer nor even a dream; it holds that to speak of objects and subjects is to fall into an impure mythology. Now then, if each psychic state is self-sufficient, if to link it to some circumstance or to an I is an illicit and idle addition, with what right do we later assign it a place in time? Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly and during the course of that dream he was not Chuang Tzu but a butterfly. How, with space and self abolished, can we link those dreaming moments to his waking moments and the feudal epoch of Chinese history? All of which does not mean that we shall never know, even if only approximately, the date of that dream; I merely mean that the chronological establishing of an event, of any event in the world, is foreign to it and outside it. In China, the dream of Chuang Tzu is proverbial; let us imagine that one of the almost infinite number of Chuang Tzu’s readers dreams he is a butterfly and then that he is Chuang Tzu. Let us imagine that, by a not impossible chance, this dream repeats, point by point, the dream of the master. Once this identity is postulated, we may well ask: Are not those coinciding moments identical? Is not one single term repeated enough to break down and confound the history of the world, to reveal that there is no such history?
The denial of time involves two negations: the negation of the succession of terms in a series, and the negation of the synchronism of terms in two series. In fact, if each term is absolute, its relations are reduced to the consciousness that those relations exist. One state precedes another if it knows it is anterior; a state of G is contemporaneous to a state of H if it knows it is contemporaneous. Contrary to what Schopenhauer57 affirmed in his table of fundamental truths (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, 4), each fraction of time does not simultaneously fill the whole of space: time is not ubiquitous. (Of course, at this point in the argument, space no longer exists.)
Meinong, in his theory of apprehension, admits of the apprehension of imaginary objects: the fourth dimension, let us say, or Condillac’s sensitive statue, or Lotze’s hypothetical animal, or the square root of minus one. If the reasons I have indicated are valid, then matter, the I, the external world, universal history, our lives, all belong to that nebulous sphere.
Moreover, the phrase negation of time is ambiguous. It can mean the eternity of Plato or of Boethius and also the dilemmas of Sextus Empiricus. This (Adversus mathematicos, XI, 197) denies the past, which already was, and the future, which is not yet, and argues that the present is either divisible or indivisible. It is not indivisible, for in that case it would have no beginning to link it to the past nor end to link it to the future, nor even a middle, for whatever has no beginning or end has no middle. Neither is it divisible, for in that case it would consist of a part that was and another that is not. Ergo, the present does not exist; and since the past and the future do not exist either, time does not exist. F. H, Bradley rediscovers and improves this perplexity: he observes (in Appearance and Reality, IV) that if the now is divisible into other nows, it is no less complicated than time; and that if it is indivisible, time is merely a relation between intemporal things. Such reasoning, obviously, denies the parts in order then to deny the whole; I reject the whole in order to exalt each one of the parts. I have arrived, via the dialectics of Berkeley and Hume, at Schopenhauer’s dictum: “The form of the phenomenon of will . . . is really only the present, not the future nor the past. The latter are only in the conception, exist only in the connection of knowledge, so far as it follows the principle of sufficient reason. No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it. . . . We might compare time to a constantly revolving sphere; the half that was always sinking would be the past, that which was always rising would be the future; but the indivisible point at the top, where the tangent touches, would be the extensionless present. As the tangent does not revolve with the sphere, neither does the present, the point of contact of the object, the form of which is time, with the subject, which has no form, because it does not belong to the knowable, but is the condition of all that is knowable.” (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 5
4.) A fifth-century Buddhist treatise, the Visuddhimagga (The Path to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine by means of the same figure: “Strictly speaking, the life of a living being . . . lasts only as long as that of a thought. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling touches earth at only one point . . . so lasts . . . the period of one thought” (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, I, 373). Other Buddhist texts say that the world is annihilated and revives six thousand five hundred million times a day and that every man is an illusion, dizzily wrought by a series of solitary and momentary men. “The man in the past, of the past moment,” the Path to Purity advises us, “has lived, but he does not live, nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live” {op. cit., I, 407), a dictum we may compare with Plutarch’s (De E apud Delphos, 18): “Yesterday’s man died in today’s, today’s dies in tomorrow’s.
And yet, and yet. . . To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are measures of apparent despair and of secret consolation. Our destiny (in contrast to Swedenborg’s hell and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironbound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
FOOTNOTE TO THE PROLOGUE
There is no exposition of Buddhism which does not mention the Milinda Panha, a second century work of apologetics; this work reports on a debate whose interlocutors are the King of Bactriana, Menander, and the monk Nagasena. The latter argues that just as the King’s carriage is not the wheels nor the chassis nor the axle nor the pole nor the yoke, neither is man matter nor form nor impressions nor ideas nor instincts nor consciousness. He is not the combination of those parts nor does he exist outside them . . . . At the end of the several-days-long debate, Menander (Milinda) converts to the faith of the Buddha.
The Milinda Panha has been rendered into English by Rhys Davids (Oxford, 1890-1894).
Freund, es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen,
So geh und werde selbst die Schrift und selmst das Wesen.
—Angelus Silesius,
Cherubinischer Wandersmann. VI, 263 (1675).
—Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
A New Refutation
of Time
Vor mir war keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine seyn,
Mit mir gebiert sie sich, mit mir geht sie auch ein.
Daniel von Czepko:
Sexcenta monodisticha sapientum, III, II (1655)
PROLOGUE
If published toward the middle of the eighteenth century, this refutation (or its name) would persist in Hume’s bibliographies and perhaps would have merited a line by Huxley or Kemp Smith. Published in 1947―after Bergson―, it is the anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentine lost in the maze of metaphysics. Both conjectures are verisimilar and perhaps true; in order to correct them, I cannot promise a novel conclusion in exchange for my rudimentary dialectic. The thesis I shall divulge is as ancient as Zeno’s arrow or the Greek king’s carriage in the Milinda Panha; the novelty, if any, consists in applying to my purpose the classic instrument of Berkeley. Both he and his continuer David Hume abound in paragraphs which contradict or exclude my thesis; nevertheless, I believe I have deduced the inevitable consequences of their doctrine.
The first article (A) was written in 1944 and appeared in number 115 of the review Sur; the second, of 1946, is a reworking of the first. Deliberately I did not make the two into one, understanding that the reading of two analogous texts might facilitate the comprehension of an indocile subject.
A word about the title. I am not unaware that it is an example of the monster termed by the logicians contradictio in adjecto, because stating that a refutation of time is new (or old) attributes to it a predicate of temporal nature which establishes the very notion the subject would destroy. I leave it as is, however, so that its slight mockery may prove that I do not exaggerate the importance of these verbal games. Besides, our language is so saturated and animated by time that it is quite possible there is not one statement in these pages which in some way does not demand or invoke the idea of time.
1 dedicate these exercises to my forebear Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur (1797-1824), who left some memorable endecasyllables to Argentine letters and who tried to reform the teaching of philosophy, purifying it of theological shadows and expounding in his courses the principles of Locke and Condillac. He died in exile; like all men, he was given bad times in which to live.
Buenos Aires,
23 December 1946
J. L. B.
A
1.
In the course of a life dedicated to letters and (at times) to metaphysical perplexity, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, in which I myself do not believe, but which regularly visits me at night and in the weary twilight with the illusory force of an axiom. This refutation is found in some way or another in all my books: it is prefigured by the poems “Inscription on Any Grave” and “The Trick” from my Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923); it is declared by two articles in Inquisitions (1925), page 46 of Evaristo Carriego(1930), the narration “Feeling in Death” from my History of Eternity (1936) and the note on page 24 of The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). None of the texts I have enumerated satisfies me, not even the penultimate one, less demonstrative and well-reasoned than it is divinatory and pathetic. I shall try to establish a basis for all of them in this essay.
Two arguments led me to this refutation: the idealism of Berkeley and Leibniz’s principle of indiscernibles.
Berkeley (Principles of Human Knowledge, 3) observed: “That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. . . The table I write on, I say, exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. . . For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.” In paragraph twenty-three he added, forestalling objections: “But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. . .” In another paragraph, number six, he had already declared: “Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any substance without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in any mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal sp
irit. . .”
Such is, in the words of its inventor, the idealist doctrine. To understand it is easy; what is difficult is to think within its limits. Schopenhauer himself, when expounding it, committed culpable negligences. In the first lines of the first volume of his Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ― from the year 1819 ― he formulated this declaration which makes him worthy of the enduring perplexity of all men: “The world is my idea: this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth. . .” In other words, for the idealist Schopenhauer, man’s eyes and hands are less illusory or apparent than the earth and the sun. In 1844 he published a complementary volume. In its first chapter he rediscovers and aggravates the previous error: he defines the universe as a phenomenon of the brain and distinguishes the “world in the head” from “the world outside the head.” Berkeley, however, had his Philonous say in 1713: “The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind. Now, I would fain know whether you think it reasonable to suppose, that one idea or thing existing in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so, pray how do you account for the origin of that primary idea or brain itself?” Schopenhauer’s dualism or cerebralism may also be licitly opposed by Spiller’s monism. Spiller (The Mind of Man, chapter VIII, 1902) argues that the retina and the cutaneous surface invoked in order to explain visual and tactile phenomena are, in turn, two tactile and visual systems and that the room we see (the “objective” one) is no greater than the one imagined (the “cerebral” one) and does not contain it, since what we have here are two independent visual systems. Berkeley (Principles of Human Knowledge,10 and 116) likewise denied the existence of primary qualities ― the solidity and extension of things ― and of absolute space.
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 Page 24
